To Persuade People, Tell Them a Story

Narrative Is a Powerful Way to Get a Message Across.

By

Dennis Nishi

Nov. 9, 2013 8:45 p.m. ET

Paul Smith had 20 minutes to sell the CEO of Procter & Gamble, and his team of managers, on new market-research techniques for which Mr. Smith's department wanted funding. As associate director of P&G'sPG-0.89% market research, Mr. Smith had spent three weeks assembling a concise pitch with more than 30 PowerPoint slides.

On the day of the meeting, CEO A.G. Lafley entered the room, greeted everybody and turned his back to the screen. He then stared intently at Mr. Smith throughout the entire presentation, not once turning to look at a slide.

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James Yang

"I felt like maybe I hadn't done a very good job because he wasn't looking at my slides like everyone else," says Mr. Smith, who also noticed that the other managers didn't seem very engaged. "It didn't occur to me until later that he did that because he was more interested in what I had to say than in what my slides looked like."

The experience prompted Mr. Smith to alter his approach. These days, he uses far fewer slides and a lot more anecdotes, turning his presentations into stories his audience can relate to instead of lecturing them on what needs changing. As a result, Mr. Smith says, he's subsequently had much greater success getting his ideas across. In four subsequent presentations to Mr. Lafley and his team, they've followed along more closely, asked more questions and given better feedback, says Mr. Smith.

Even with digital and social-media tools, employees often struggle to convey ideas to each other, to managers and to customers. That's why companies such as FedEx, Kimberly-Clark and Microsoft are teaching executives to tell relatable stories as a way to improve workplace communication.

It's a tool that's more useful than PowerPoint presentations, say career experts, who note that storytelling can also be used on a day-to-day basis to sell ideas to one person or a hundred. But being an effective storyteller requires preparation.

Move beyond facts and figures, which aren't as memorable as narratives, says Cliff Atkinson, a communications consultant from Kensington, Calif., and author of "Beyond Bullet Points."

Many people in business think raw data is persuasive. But when you're dealing with people from other departments and in different fields who don't understand how you got that data, you can lose them pretty quickly.

"You have to step back and put yourself into their shoes and take them through the process of understanding," says Mr. Atkinson. "That requires you to distill the most important facts and wrap them in an engaging story."

Find ways to connect with your audience on an emotional level, says Mr. Atkinson. Neuroscientists have discovered that most decisions—whether people realize it or not—are informed by emotional responses. Do some legwork to find significant events in your audience's lives or your own that you can base your story on or use to reinforce your points, he says.

This can include dropping in anecdotes about taking care of a sick family member or a memorable customer story, says Mr. Smith, now a corporate trainer and author of "Lead With a Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives That Captivate, Convince, and Inspire."

Mr. Smith's book mentions a story told by a single mother to P&G about the trade-offs that she made to support her children. Her experiences, more than anything else that year, convinced P&G executives to lower their price on shortening.

Mr. Atkinson suggests organizing your story into three acts and starting by establishing context. You want to let your audience know who the main characters are, what the background of the story is, and what you'd like to accomplish by telling it, he says. You might open, for example, by describing a department that's consistently failed to meet sales goals.

Move on to how your main character—you or the company—fights to resolve the conflicts that create tension in the story, Mr. Atkinson says. Success may require the main character to make additional capital investments or take on new training. Provide real-world examples and detail that can anchor the narrative, he advises.

The ending should inspire a call to action, since you are allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions about your story versus just telling them what to do. Don't be afraid to use your own failures in support of your main points, says Mr. Smith.

Whatever you do, don't preface your story with an apology or ask permission to tell it. Be confident that your story has enough relevance to be told and just launch into it, says Mr. Smith. Confidence and authority, he says, help to sell the idea to your audience.

Right -- let's encourage more people to avoid facts and just endorse the "who cares about truth" culture we now live in. Just because people are tired of PowerPoint slides doesn't mean we should abandon (1) facts (including data) behind our opinions or recommendations, nor (2) creating truth-testable presentations. As Dr. Deming famously said, "In God we trust. All others bring data."

Well, its time to say that customer's buys stories not the product despite of the fact whatever you are selling to them. If they can find utility in their offering narrated through a story makes the perfect combination to close the deal there-and-then. So where we are heading - Stories, Content, Co-relate , Ideas , Benefits sells - summed up.

I am not sure if persuading people is to be considered science (as e.g. Dr. Robert Cialdini positions it) or just common sense. Knowing, understanding and empathizing with your audience (and the people around you) is always key to connecting with them. Have a look at my blog post about the "principles of persuasion" on http://b2bstorytelling.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/principles-of-persuasion/

Dennis has raised an important issue regarding our workplace communication, negotiation and persuasion. It is also very apt from the cognitive psychological angle. Our brain is hard-wired to understand and retain stories much better than isolated incidents because we are able to use both left and right brain characteristics. A very good article for all professionals to improve work place communication.

A solid article with great insights through the comments. Like most things its about balance. Story telling has long been the key to success with public speakers. It engages audiences short term yet creates within them a long term memory. I'm jaded with the formulaic story with little supporting facts, entertaining, but not informative. I don't think the presenter is any smarter if they ram 1k facts and figures into 30 minutes either. The best presentations I have experienced have achieved an optimal balance. A simple story that is interwoven throughout the presentation leads the audience on a memorable journey. Powerpoint was used to effectively convey complex concepts with a single visual.

Powerpoint is the enemy of a good presentation. Prior to its creation, it was a rather difficult job to create a visual. As a result, you created fewer visuals but they were much more important to what you were presenting. You had to do the heavy lifting for most of them and make them as information rich as possible to allow you to discuss things. These days they "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, bury them in cow patties aka Powerpoint visuals." approach seems to be rampant. The presentation from hell from a Dilbert strip. It does not have to be that way.

This month in Obamacare reminds me of a story. A guy wanted to be promoted to stationmaster, and the railroad made him take an oral exam to see if he knew the job. So the examiner said, "Suppose you saw the northbound train and the southbound train heading right for each other on the same track. What would you do?" So the guy said, "I'd get a red flag and run out there and signal them to stop." The examiner said, "Well, suppose night was falling and the engineers wouldn't be able to see the flag. Then what?" The guy said, "In that case I'd light my red lantern and stand by the track, waving it." So the examiner said, "Suppose you found the lantern was broken. What would you do then?" The guy said, "I'd call my wife". "Your wife?" "Yes, I'd say, Honey, come a-runnin', because you're gonna have a front-row seat at the biggest train wreck you'll ever see."

"Find ways to connect with your audience on an emotional level, says Mr. Atkinson. Neuroscientists have discovered that most decisions—whether people realize it or not—are informed by emotional responses. Do some legwork to find significant events in your audience's lives or your own that you can base your story on or use to reinforce your points, he says."

sorry, i prefer data and clear analysis. save the drama and story telling for soap operas (and their commercials).

My friend the actor Chris Farley was less inhibited in real life than he was in the movie Tommy Boy. Do you remember how the character he played sold hundreds of dollars of brake pads to wholesalers by telling stories about his father buying steaks? I met Chris at a diner called Tempo doing an impromptu sketch from his booth about girls he met at the Shelter nightclub who went to school forever.

Storytelling in business has become the new black with everyone professing allegiance to the concept. The reality is few companies or executives walk the talk, defaulting to me-me-me communications. It doesn't matter whether you're "selling" to an internal audience like the P&G management example or your target customers, people gravitate to information that has an entertainment quality.

Enter storytelling or I should say "storytelling techniques" after being chastised last week by National Storytelling Network for bastardizing the word. The point is, the same techniques employed by novelists can be applied to business communications. But like a novelist, it calls for empathy, a quality not exactly in large supply in the business world.

Someone I know likes to tell stories to illustrate technical points. Unfortunately, his technique suffers from three fatal flaws:

1) He adores dramatic pauses but doesn't do enough buildup to them to make his listeners say, "So what happened next? Don't leave us hanging!" While politely waiting, they just get bored and their eyes glaze over. Sometimes they change the subject.

2) He assumes everyone shares his frame of reference.

3) He tells the story to please himself rather than his audience. People sense this intuitively. We have a common name for people such as this -- they're called "bores."

Relating your presentation with your own story will definitely help others to get involved into your topic.When i had given presentation in my company about "The future of Mobile Application", i started by telling them a story, when i had attended my friend's marriage, and we were struggling to use tie, later on by using an application in Android device which is"How to Tie a Tie", we did it. This story made my listeners a clear idea what im gonna tell them and it was successful.

One of my good friends is Lew Hunter, one of the architects of the UCLA Masters level Screenwriting course. Occasionally, he has MBA students smart enough to take his class the learn how to tell good stories. I think it should be a requirement. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review came out an said it pretty darn bluntly: advertising will be replaced by immersive story worlds.

P&G should wake up. They tell stories in the boardroom but their advertising attempts to do the same thing because ad agencies only know how to pitch people and a good story is not pitchy.

Its been almost 20 years we have been using storytelling constructs over advertising and our clients see amazing results. I actually issued a challenge to P&G that if they gave us 10% of their ad budget we would get better results than their current agency spending billions. They have yet to take us up on the offer and flounder with their own effort. I even said they could put a full page ad in the WSJ saying how much we suck if we failed, still no response. Even though we have the top storytellers in the world as part of our company.

This goes beyond the boardroom. Stories are what Aristotle told us moved people. He set out the design for it in his "Poetics." Advertising, is not storytelling but information pushed at us interrupting stories. The term story is so overused. Doing it right is rarely done and since most agencies only know how to pitch it rather than relate to a customer they will keep failing at their job.

Fortunately, we have mastered the art and use it for a number of F100 companies and we can do it for you.

This is one of my blogs that features and interview with Tony Robbins and Peter Gruber about using stories in business and marketing.

My best selling book on marketing in the digital age is available for FREE download on the web site listed below.

just realize that while stories and fewer power point presentations may work for some or most people, there are other people, including some CEOs, that won't sit still for a story. they love power point and the graph, charts, numbers, etc. that usually fill the slides. personally, I prefer the story-based approach with fewer slides but have seen CEOs without the patience for that.

Stories have been used since time immemorial to convince and persuade people to a certain point of view. Good story-telling is a dying art, and should be encouraged, even in the corporate world...This very concept was demonstrated beautifully by our Lord, Who told the most CONVINCING and PERSUASIVE stories, also known as "parables"...(and by all accounts, His "story-telling" was pretty successful, if you consider the level of staying power and "brand loyalty" He engendered towards His "product"...)

Dumb. Jesus said he spoke in parables so that the average person would not have a clue what he was talking about.

Matthew 13:11-13The disciples came to him and asked, "Why do you speak to the people in parables?". He replied, "Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables: "Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

Long ago in the skies over Mississippi, I flew a trainer jet with my instructor. We sat in tandem, so there were procedures to follow if one of us wanted to take control of the aircraft.

My instructor said he wanted to fly the plane for a while. I shook the stick and held my hands in the air, visible to him...and I said "You have the airplane". Then I saw the stick shake as I heard him say "I have the airplane."

I became a passenger in 1st Class...a glass bubble and all of creation laid out for me to enjoy. I relaxed and watched. Soon, I noticed the instructor was not doing anything...the aircraft was in a gentle left descending turn....round and round, down and down. It was relaxing to watch.

But we started to near 10,000 feet. That was our legal minimum altitude in that area. It seemed like my instructor was going to violate that restriction, and sure enough, the plane descended through 10,000 and kept going around and around, down and down.

The instructor said, "You are getting kinda low aren't you?"

ME?? I told him he had done the stick shake and taken control of the aircraft.

Whatever...we had flown for a few minutes with neither of us piloting the aircraft. We were both passengers in a plane where no one was the pilot..

Ever notice ObamaCare has no one in charge? It is like the Benghazi mess....nobody was responsible there either.

Is it possible for ObamaCare to do a good job without a pilot actually directing the program? Or is Obama just content to be a First Class passenger, watching our nation go 'round and 'round, down and down?

Your analogy is not quite apt, Greg. In the Obamacare case, the instructor has never flown a plane before. However, he has incontrovertible ideological views about how you should be piloting your life. In the scenario you describe, its only a matter of time before you crash and burn.

And that is by design - If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. Sort of like a similar ideologue once said when confronted with the bloodiness of the Bolsheviks - "you need to break eggs in order to make an omelette". The ends will always justify the means.

Everybody remembers Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. Few even remember that Everett gave the oration of the day. "In November 1863, when the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was dedicated, Everett was invited to be the featured speaker.[91] In his two-hour formal oration he compared the Battle of Gettysburg to battles of antiquity such as Marathon, and spoke about how opposing sides in previous civil wars (such as the War of the Roses and the Thirty Years' War) were able to reconcile their differences afterward. Everett's oration was followed by the now far more famous Gettysburg Address of President Lincoln. For his part, Everett was deeply impressed by the concise speech and wrote to Lincoln noting "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."[92] " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Everett Sometimes less is a lot more.

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